Letter: Buzz from climbing

Derek Elsom's article on lightning brought to mind an incident that occurred to some friends and myself some years ago while mountaineering in Scotland ('Learn to live with lightning', 24 June).

In late March we were climbing a mountain ridge leading to Bidean nam Bian in the Glencoe area. Part of the ridge took us through a cloud and mist formation as the cloud ceiling was quite low.

At the time we were carrying all the necessary winter mountaineering equipment and had our ice axes strapped on to the back of our rucksacks in the normal way, that is, with the point upwards.

At one stage I became aware of a loud humming noise, and it took a couple of minutes to find the source. However, when we took off our backpacks and laid them on the ground the noise stopped: what had happened was that the upturned point of ...

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